The BOB Revolution Products that resonate with their users on an emotional level become ingrained in user’s lives and generate their own grassroots marketing buzz. These are the products that users rave about online, tell their friends about in great detail,...

As someone who picks paper towels over electric hand dryers every time, I never would have expected to find a dryer that I not only want to use, but actually want to talk about too. Until, that is, I discovered...

I’m kind of a vinyl nerd. When things get hectic, I retreat to the man-cave in my garage, play some pinball and play my records on a little turntable perched on my workbench. I’ve always been curious about the process for making vinyl records. I found the answer in...

There’s a lot of talk these days about the cloud…some of it from us even. However, we can’t help but share the concern Kenneth Wong expressed in a recent blog post, where he asserts that the term ‘cloud’ is being “interpreted,...

When I was a design consultant, potential clients would tell us all about how their cool new products were going to take over the market. Sometimes a company’s product really was cool and new–though it was doubtful it was going to make its mark in the manner envisioned. Occasionally...

I was fascinated by the video in Marc’s recent post about the official soccer ball of the 2010 World Cup. What struck me was the highly optimized combination of handwork and custom tooling involved in the manufacture of a high-quality commodity product. For example, the inner shell panels are...

The official match ball for the upcoming FIFA world cup, the Adidas Jabulani, features a newly developed “Grip’n'Groove” surface for enhanced grip in all conditions and an exceptionally stable flight path. Thanks to a new spherical-molding process for the eight thermally-bonded panels, the ball is perfectly round and thus...

A friend recently posted the following Facebook status: “Krysten has just achieved her first Sock Wars kill by delivering a pair of hand knit socks to a stranger in Sacramento—on to victim #2…” Sock Wars is like the game of Assassin, where players knock each other off using suction...

As a parent of young children, product safety is always top of mind. So when two products I count on were recently recalled in what felt like short succession, it got me thinking. (While I did have a...

Today at SolidWorks World, Jeff Ray, CEO of SolidWorks, announced Product Data Sharing (PDS) as the first of the company’s online services to be available on the Enovia v6 backbone. SolidWorks definitely took a cue from social networking and online communities like LinkedIn and Facebook. Now designers can...